The Serious People And The Fringe

I would note that, as Hounshell himself admits, not a single U.S. president has actually done more than mouth empty threats or apply mild, temporary, pressure on Israel over its settlements. All serious people may believe settlements are corrosive to peace, but those people do not include the current Prime Minister of Israel and the current U.S. administration (again, judge what they do, not what they say).

What Sarah Palin is saying has been U.S. policy in deed, if not in word, for decades. I see no reason to beat up on Palin over stating the obvious, not least because she will (thankfully) never be president. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete makes a fair point, which is why it is somewhat misleading to refer to Palin as being on the “lunatic fringe.” Lunatic? Maybe. But whatever else her views are, they are definitely not on the fringe. In practice, as Scoblete notes, it is the advocates of a settlement freeze who are on the margins and the supporters of continued settlement in the territories who actually make policy. This is the way it has been for decades. Of course Palin’s statements on the subject are formulaic and betray her ignorance of the “basic nuances of the conflict.” First of all, she is repeating what her advisors and allies have told her to say about these things, and she is keeping her lines as simple as possible. What matters to her hawkish allies and her loyal followers is not whether she understands the issue. For these people, understanding and nuance are obstacles to be overcome. What matters is whether she adopts the correct pose. In this case, she has to strike the pose of being unflinchingly, reflexively supportive of Israel, and so she takes a maximalist position that secures her reputation as reliably “pro-Israel.” It makes no difference if the maximalist position she takes is actually worse for Israel in the long term. She has established the appearance of respecting Israel’s “rights” to do whatever it wants in contrast to an administration that her backers believe has been “bullying” Israel.

As a matter of internal Republican Party and movement politics, what Hounshell describes as lunacy is the consensus view on the right. This is why Huckabee’s earlier dabbling with neo-transferism isn’t the least bit surprising. We should also be a bit wary of invoking the authority of “serious people.” I think it is true that informed people understand why continued expansion of settlements is detrimental to the long-term interests of all parties, but after the last decade of terrible foreign policy guidance by self-proclaimed “serious people” there is hardly anything more damning one can say about something than to say that “serious people” embrace it.

There is a problem in hiding behind policy consensus and dismissing those outside it as an irrelevant fringe, and this is that the consensus gets important things wrong with remarkable frequency. Hawkish interventionists were able to create the (false) impression that 9/11 happened because America was too wedded to geopolitical stability and was too willing to tolerate authoritarian governments in the Near East, and then the lazy establishment consensus allowed itself to be dragged along with them to support an unnecessary and disastrous war. Establishment consensus views on Iraq and its weapon programs were wrong; consensus support for the bombardment of Lebanon and the Gaza operation was also wrong; the “serious” bipartisan consensus in favor of NATO expansion has been disastrously wrong. The trouble with Palin’s views on settlements and Israel-Palestine is not that they are on the fringe, but that they are as deeply misinformed about political realities in the region as so many of the consensus views mentioned above. As with all of those, it is the ill-informed and ideologically-driven position that prevails when it comes to policy decisions.

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3 Responses to The Serious People And The Fringe

I’m opposed to the colonies, euphemized as settlements, but depending on future events, the call to halt them may be merely a rationale for claiming to be even-handed.

Perhaps a two-state deal is possible and might bring a measure of stability, in which case a settlement freeze to help broker such a deal would be good for Israel.

However, if there’s a major war, provoked, say, by an Israeli raid on Iran and subsequent retaliation, and Israel wins, she might very well try to repeat the Nakba and kick Palestinians by the thousands out of the West Bank. After all, Kuwait expelled thousands of Palestinians in 1991, and more than two million people have fled Iraq since 2003, and all but a few human rights pests have kept mum about it.

Ethnic cleansers sometimes win. Are the Serbs returning to the Krajina, the Greeks to Smyrna, the Sudeten Germans to the Czech lands?

If you’re part of the ethnonationalist Zionist right, you might prefer to keep building colonies and keep the trucks and buses gassed up. Reprehensible; criminal in fact, but plausible.

The question for Americans is why we let the Israelis expand their colonies with our money, weapons, vetoes and émigrés.

“What Sarah Palin is saying has been U.S. policy in deed, if not in word, for decades. I see no reason to beat up on Palin over stating the obvious, not least because she will (thankfully) never be president.”

I think it’s important to keep in mind that people like Palin aren’t primarily interested in making sure that the United States doesn’t deploy hypocritical foreign policy rhetoric. If they were then it might be appropriate to praise Palin for tellin’ it like it is when it comes to settlements, or to praise Bush for codifying as official US policy the disrespect for international law that was already this country’s standard operating procedure.

But Palin, Bush and their supporters in the media aren’t interested in making US rhetoric consistent with US policy. They’re interested in shifting the bounds of acceptable discourse so it becomes more vicious and aggressive, thereby making it possible to engage in actions that are even more vicious and aggressive than the rhetoric. Witness how the Bush administration’s rhetorical contempt for detainees’ rights, international law, etc., was accompanied by actions which went far beyond even the nasty language.

So anyone who’s concerned about Israel’s settlement policy shouldn’t applaud Palin for “straight talk” (or whatever). I think she’s a cretin, so I don’t think she’s knowingly playing some kind of devious rhetorical game. But she’s certainly useful to people who think that the big problem with US foreign policy is that we aren’t willing enough to kill and/or piss off foreigners.

“But Palin, Bush and their supporters in the media aren’t interested in making US rhetoric consistent with US policy. They’re interested in shifting the bounds of acceptable discourse so it becomes more vicious and aggressive, thereby making it possible to engage in actions that are even more vicious and aggressive than the rhetoric. Witness how the Bush administration’s rhetorical contempt for detainees’ rights, international law, etc., was accompanied by actions which went far beyond even the nasty language.”

IMHO, this is really, really important. They take the hidden beliefs and desires of some vile people, and raise them into the light of respectibility.